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Executive Editor of The Times and Top Deputy Step Down

Howell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the top-ranking editors of The New York Times , resigned yesterday morning, five weeks after the resignation of a reporter set off a chain of events that exposed fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom.

In a hastily arranged gathering in the newsroom on the third floor, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told staff members that he wanted to "applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interests of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own."

Mr. Sulzberger said that Mr. Raines, 60, who was the paper's executive editor for less than two years, would be succeeded on an interim basis by Joseph Lelyveld, 66, his immediate predecessor, who retired in 2001. There will be no immediate successor for Mr. Boyd, 52, who was the paper's managing editor.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said that the search for a permanent executive editor was likely "to move quickly" — other company officials said it could be a matter of weeks — and that candidates would be considered from inside and outside the paper.

For the staff members of The Times, the resignations yesterday set off a wave of emotions from sadness to relief, and prompted several dozen journalists from competing news organizations to stake out the entrance of its headquarters, at 229 West 43rd Street.

At a town-hall-style meeting on May 14 — three days after The Times had described in an extensive article how Jayson Blair, a staff reporter, had made errors or committed the equivalent of journalistic fraud in at least 36 articles since October — Mr. Sulzberger told the newsroom staff that he would not accept Mr. Raines's resignation if it were offered.

But in the days and weeks that followed, some of the newspaper's reporters and editors said they told Mr. Sulzberger that the newsroom's disaffection with Mr. Raines was so deep as to likely be irreparable.

By Wednesday night, Mr. Sulzberger said in an interview, he and the two editors had "a meeting of the minds, if you will."

"This was a decision that Howell and Gerald made, that I sadly accepted," he said. "It was not precipitated by any specific event. It happened over a period of time."

"The morale of the newsroom is critical," Mr. Sulzberger said in an earlier interview yesterday. The ability of reporters and editors "to perform depends on their feeling they are being treated in a collaborative and collegial fashion."

The announcement of the two resignations came at midmorning, as many people were still arriving for work. Mr. Raines, clutching a microphone before dozens of reporters, editors, photographers and other newsroom staff members, many of whom sobbed audibly, said, "As I'm standing before you for the last time, I want to thank you for the honor and privilege of being a member of the best journalistic community in the world."

"It's been a tumultuous month, 20 months," he added, "but we have produced some memorable newspapers."

He concluded by saying, "Remember, when a great story breaks out, go like hell."

The remark, which could have been spoken by one of the role models Mr. Raines often cited to his staff, the longtime Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, underscored both the magnitude of the many news events that have taken place since the two men took over in September 2001, and the extensive resources the newspaper devoted to reporting on them.

Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd led the newspaper's coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the collapse of Enron ; and the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. In addition, the two men took on additional responsibilities during their tenure, overseeing the editorial operations of The International Herald Tribune. (The New York Times Company, which already owned half of the newspaper, bought the rest from the Washington Post Company in January.)

Fourteen months ago, The Times was awarded a record seven Pulitzer Prizes, six related to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

But after the deceptions of Mr. Blair were brought to light, including the plagiarizing of articles from other newspapers and news agencies and the concocting of quotations, long-simmering complaints about the management style of the editors rose to the surface.

At the staff meeting on May 14, Mr. Raines said he accepted ultimate responsibility for what Mr. Blair had done and pledged to improve his rapport with the people who worked for him. In recent days, he tried to win over colleagues, at dinners and in private conversations.

After concluding his brief remarks yesterday morning, Mr. Raines, who joined the paper in 1978 as a national correspondent in Atlanta and later served as Washington bureau chief and editor of the editorial page, walked through an impromptu receiving line of colleagues offering condolences and well wishes. They included Mr. Sulzberger's father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the paper's chairman emeritus and former publisher.

To Michael Wilson, a reporter on the metropolitan staff whom Mr. Raines had helped hire and who had just returned from Iraq, he said, "You had a good war."

A short while later, Mr. Raines grabbed a straw hat from the office he had just vacated and walked out of the building. Mr. Boyd followed a minute later. (Neither man responded to requests for interviews.)

Moments before the men departed, the younger Mr. Sulzberger had told the staff, "There is so much to say, but it really just boils down to this: This is a day that breaks my heart, and I think it breaks the hearts of a lot of people in this room."

He added that the newspaper, which was founded in 1851, had "seen good times and bad times" and would continue to do so in the coming decades.

"We will learn from them and we will grow from them," he said. "And we will return to doing journalism at this newspaper because that's what we're here for."

For the news media, the day's events were the culmination of a story line that had played out for weeks. The Times's investigation into Mr. Blair's journalistic deceptions revealed communication problems among the top editors and newsroom department heads. Some staff members said those problems — including the top-down management style of Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd — contributed to gaps in the oversight of Mr. Blair as he helped cover several major news events, including the Washington-area sniper hunt and the hometown reaction to the rescue of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch. Other internal problems of the newsroom were soon playing out in the news media.

On May 28, for example, several reporters on the national staff circulated internal e-mail messages complaining about comments that had been made to The Washington Post by their colleague Rick Bragg, after The Times published an editors' note that said he had relied heavily on the reporting of a freelance journalist for an article about oystermen of the Florida Gulf Coast in Apalachicola, which Mr. Bragg had visited only briefly.

Mr. Bragg suggested it was common practice for national correspondents to rely on such freelancers for the bulk of their reporting, a characterization that many of the reporters disputed. By early that evening, Mr. Raines had announced that Mr. Bragg, a reporter to whom he was close, had resigned.

The departure of Mr. Boyd, the newspaper's first black managing editor, prompted the New York Association of Black Journalists to release a statement from its president, Errol Cockfield, that said, in part: "There are many black journalists who are questioning whether, in an effort to restore its credibility, The Times has gone too far."

Mr. Cockfield, a reporter at Newsday, added, "We should not make journalists scapegoats for a dysfunctional system."

A committee of editors and reporters as well as several outside news media experts has been charged with taking a sweeping look at the paper's newsroom practices, and is expected to report its findings in July.

Gay Talese, who worked as a reporter at the paper from 1955 to 1965 and later wrote "The Kingdom and the Power" (World, 1969), a narrative account of its history, said that the resignations came on "a dark day," but that the paper surely would endure.

"I grew up believing The New York Times represented the closest that we could get in this country to trying to get the facts right with a sense of fairness and balance," Mr. Talese said. "I believe that The Times, in doing what it did today, sad and sacrificial as it may be, is nevertheless acting in the paper's enduring spirit to be responsible."